Suddenly, Love

13

ERNST READS THE CHAPTER TO IRENA. IT’S HARD FOR HER to follow his words, but Ernst’s voice captivates her, and for hours afterward her body throbs with excitement. This time she understands the content, and she is stunned by the opacity of his heart. Why did you run away from your mother and father? she wants to ask. Ernst senses her astonishment and tries to explain, but it’s hard for him. He knows that Irena possess a language of her own and has her own images in her heart. When he utters the words he has written, they sound exaggerated and artificial to him, and he immediately retracts them. Were it not for the close attention she pays, he would not read his work to her. Every time he tries to explain something to her, he feels the same disappointment with himself.

“Why did I run away from my parents? you ask. Because I believed that it was possible to correct how life is lived. My parents belonged to the Generation of the Desert, which could not be reformed. For that reason I refused to accept their love. Is that so complicated?”

Usually Ernst addresses Irena abruptly, but this time he speaks at length. Irena can’t understand his words, but she feels that they have come from his heart. When Ernst is moved, his face and neck become delicately flushed. On her way home, Irena thinks again about all the things Ernst has said to her. She opens the door to her house cautiously and immediately lights a candle. She closes her eyes and says, “God, help Ernst find his way to You. If he finds his way, he will be cured. He is very ill, and his thoughts torment him. Give him words so that he can ask for forgiveness from his parents.”

Irena then begins to tidy the rooms. For years after her parents’ death, the house kept the form that her mother had given it. Now it is Irena’s private sanctuary. The clothes and most of the utensils aren’t used. Sometimes it seems to her that they have lost their former life, and no precious memories waft up from them. There are days when Irena sits in one place and tries for hours to absorb what the house evokes from within.

God, she prays silently, restore Ernst’s parents to him. Without parents, we have no grip on the world. They watch over us in this world, and when they’re in the World of Truth, they are no less connected to us. So devoted is her prayer that she actually sees Ernst’s parents. His father reclines on the sofa, and his mother is in the kitchen. The silence between them is tense. It’s hard for her to erase that image, perhaps because Ernst keeps describing it in different ways.

So far he has written nothing about his grandparents, who lived in the Carpathian Mountains. Irena feels closely connected to her grandparents. She knows about their lives in detail. Every night for many years her mother would tell her a story about them or relate an incident. No wonder they have a shadowy place in her memories. Two portraits hang on the eastern wall in her home: her grandfather, a tall man, is leaning on a cane, wearing a peasant shirt belted at his hips; sharp honesty shines from his face. Her grandmother is a short, heavyset woman with a warm smile.

Irena loves to look at their photographs. She often soars away and visits with them in their house and in the fields, accompanying them to synagogue and back. The stories her mother told her become alive, and they bring up images and visions. When she is by herself at home, she is not alone. Irena knows what happened to her grandparents during the war, but the feeling that they live on is stronger than the reality of their deaths. Once her mother told her, in her own father’s name, that death was an illusion and that it should be ignored. This has stayed in her mind.

Irena is sorry that Ernst’s parents don’t come to comfort him. His illness vexes him, and his writing is impeded. Though he does write, he crosses out and rips up what he has written. Irena feels that if he were to ask for forgiveness from his parents, he would rouse them in the World Above, and they would enlist his grandparents to help him as well. Irena doesn’t know how to speak to Ernst about this; she worries that if she does so, he will scold her.

That night Irena lights some candles so that the house won’t be without their flickering flames. When the house is lit by candles, the evil shadows have no power over her or over her dreams.